You don't have to recruit everyone who's good. When I ran TDW I didn't just go out and recruit everyone that was good. The point is more don't limit recruitment to only those who are the best of the best of the best.

I recruited people who wanted to get better and I simply enjoyed playing with as well. D4 was a good example, while he wrecked in RokkitBall he was only an mid to upper mid tier Galcon player. However I really enjoyed playing with him, and he truly wanted to improve, so I gave him that chance.

But even that being said, EGP was far more popular a clan. Your example of looking up to them as one of many. EGP took in a lot of newer people and trained them. And because of that they were the clan everyone loved. TDW was never as popular as EGP even though most people regarded it as the best clan (skill wise).

One problem is people are good in different situations. I am terrible with 1-1 on large planet starts, for instance, but I'm one of the best at 1-1 in large team starts, and not bad at 1-1 with few planet starts.

Against even the best 1-1 players on large planet starts (my nearly worst ability), I will lose 20-7. Most of that is spawn.

I think a lot of spawn luck could be alleviated with a symmetric board and symmetric start (there are three possible symmetries: top-down mirror, left-right mirror, and origin, so there still could be a lot of randomness in team or one-one).

If spawn luck were eliminated, I bet I'd lose 20-2 or 20-1 against the best. Change the starting conditions to fewer-closer planets and I'd might end up winning 15-20 against the same player.

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Not sure how this fits into "tiers" or clans. I think the really issue is we have too few pickup games by themselves to have clans, and galcon is first a individual player game. Clans are best played in versus.

It'd be impossible to imagine "Clans" in the board game Diplomacy, "clans" and "teams" in Chess even is a bit of a stretch. Yet even a nearly extinct team-based game like Netrek has had "league play" longer than nearly every other game has been available on the Internet--at least since the late 80's. I wouldn't be surprised if before there was TCP/IP, the predecessor to that game, Empire, had proto-clans.

Because of that, if people want to set up Clans, more power to them. Esp, if it makes the general quality of play better. :-)

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As for testing Chi-Ro's "tier" theory, the best way would be if the rank system were computed by algorithms like ELO instead of the current formula.

Like Chess, you could have different ELO rankings based on different game types: 1-1, FFA, even team, and for different classes of starts: 200/10, 200/65, 150/65, 150/35, 150/10, ...)

If most people's ELO, after an initial burst, stabilized over time for a given class=type, there was a decent distribution of ELO, and there were no player consistently with the top ELOs then you'd have tiers.

With a symmetric system almost all of the luck would leave the game in 1v1. There probably could be a definable "best" that way.

The tier system would still be valid however.

Personally I'm not a fan of the symmetric map idea (it's come up many times), but I'm primarily a FFA player. In FFA clusters are the essence and personality of the game. I can understand their use in 1v1 though.

On a side note:

Anything you guys could think of as a good prize for the regular competition? For example, I'm probably not buying everyone a T-Shirt every time, needs to be something that can be consistent.

I don't like the idea of symmetry in FFA. I specifically was suggesting it for 1-1 and Teams only. Maybe as an optional board setting or flag that can be enabled/voted for.

To me, FFA is most like Diplomacy. Anyone who has played that game knows that the board is inherently unfair. Statistics of which countries win bear this out. And yet, because of the nature of the game, even the worst performing countries have pretty decent win rates overall, because among good players, that low win rate is taken into account by parties and can be manipulated for advantage.

Diplomacy works that way because of multiple poles. Other games with asymmetric starts but bipolar zero-sum (like Axis and Allies), end up not being played continually, and certainly not competitively.

(I like the idea of having badges for winning comps. I got offered a mug or t-shirt for winning Halloween tourney once, but I never cashed it in -- the badge was enough for me.)

You don't have to recruit everyone who's good. When I ran TDW I didn't just go out and recruit everyone that was good. The point is more don't limit recruitment to only those who are the best of the best of the best.

I recruited people who wanted to get better and I simply enjoyed playing with as well. D4 was a good example, while he wrecked in RokkitBall he was only an mid to upper mid tier Galcon player. However I really enjoyed playing with him, and he truly wanted to improve, so I gave him that chance.

But even that being said, EGP was far more popular a clan. Your example of looking up to them as one of many. EGP took in a lot of newer people and trained them. And because of that they were the clan everyone loved. TDW was never as popular as EGP even though most people regarded it as the best clan (skill wise).

People want to see aK be a EGP, not a TDW. ;)

i liked tdw more, i disliked egp leaders at the time :), shinta and tomatzo, but later most of good egp players left and we had AAO abd AGW, AGW was the best ;P .

If most people's ELO, after an initial burst, stabilized over time for a given class=type, there was a decent distribution of ELO, and there were no player consistently with the top ELOs then you'd have tiers.

Eh, close but not completely on point. Lets take a pretty popular game, without the map luck element involved as an example:

These are the top players in their respective ladders. Within these ladders they are the "Grand Master" tier. None of them are undefeated. That means on any given day, any one of these guys all being grand masters could pull a victory verse another. That's why they're grand masters. There are some who are better, and have the advantage, but it could really go either way in most of these fights. They're all in the top tier of this game (grand masters) and that is to say any of them could pull off a win against another under the right circumstances.

Now add something like lucky spawns in Galcon.

A tier system doesn't eliminate the possibility of a "best" player. In this, there is a best. It acknowledges that all of these players are at a level where they are as a whole, the best players. Any one could probably beat any other with no luck involved at all. They are all in the "top tier".